Enrique
Krauze

Project Syndicate: The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, you wrote in July, showed that, through reason, “one can counter the ‘ultimate barbarism’ that comes with unchecked human passions.” In the wake of a US presidential election that embodied our “present era of fanaticisms,” what does Spinoza have to say to US leaders and civil society? What practical steps can be taken to reinvigorate core values defended by Spinoza, such as “science, a belief in objective facts, democratic civility,” and “tolerance”?

Enrique Krauze: We are living through a new chapter in an eternal story, as the theological and political hatreds that Spinoza suffered in his life and confronted in his work undergo a resurgence. The details are different: the issues shaping our lives and discourse have changed, and whereas clerics and monarchs used to be the ones stoking hatred, charismatic political figures like Donald Trump do so today. But the passions are the same. Now, as then, the mob gathers in the public square – nowadays on global social networks – to “lynch” their irreconcilable enemies.

This revival of intolerance brings Spinoza back to the fore. His treatises amount to a kind of secular bible of republican civility. But Spinoza had no illusions about the influence of his ideas on the masses. His intellectual amendment, as he would say, was destined for the enlightened minorities of his time, and for future eras – like ours.

Spinoza viewed the sad spectacle created by the surging hatreds of his time with a certain stoic resignation. There was no sadness, let alone submission, in this resignation. Rather, Spinoza’s was a kind of productive acceptance, which motivated him in two directions.
First, Spinoza was driven to investigate all matters, earthly and divine, with a scientific spirit. At a time when novel phenomena – social, cultural, and natural – are urgently challenging our knowledge and understanding, scientific curiosity is essential. Fortunately, I do not believe that it has been extinguished, though there is certainly room to encourage and enhance it.

Second, Spinoza’s life and work display an extraordinary combativeness – a willingness to fight for something better. In this dark age of new identity fanaticisms, imperialisms, and populisms – embodied by Trump – the will to keep fighting could not be more important.

So, the lessons are clear. While the world remains a sad spectacle, and the power of reason remains limited, reason remains our best means of understanding the passions and hatreds that are shaping our lives, thereby weakening their hold over us. Defending individual freedom from the “ultimate barbarism” of our age is vital.

PS: Mexican democracy, too, is on a destructive path, you lamented last month, as President Claudia Sheinbaum follows in the footsteps of her “tyrannical, self-obsessed” predecessor. What do Mexico’s recent constitutional reforms mean for its future, and how are the results of the US presidential election likely to affect its trajectory?

EK: That the “last barbarism” embodied by Trump is headed back to the White House – the seat of power once occupied by the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt – is frightening. That it will be Trump who marks the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2026 is shocking. But the American republic is not the Weimar Republic. There will be no Reichstag fire; the separation of powers will not be erased; and the free press will not be extinguished. The night will be long and dark – rebuilding the concord (to use an old Ciceronian term) that underpins democracy will be difficult and slow – but day will eventually dawn.

The same cannot be said for Mexico. Here, democracy was always an exception, never a rule. Let us say schematically that Mexico was a theocracy under the Aztecs, an absolute monarchy under the Spanish empire, and a country dominated by caudillos in the first half of the nineteenth century. Since then, in a history plagued by authoritarianism, civil war, and revolution, Mexico has conducted just three brief democratic experiments. The first, which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, lasted 11 years. The second, at the beginning of the twentieth century, survived a mere 15 months. The third, which began in 2000, is about to end.

Perhaps the demise of Mexico’s latest attempt at democracy was predictable, considering our lack of any democratic culture. But it might not have been inevitable. The problem is that the three successive governments that ran the country from 2000 until 2018 lacked the knowledge, will, or both to tackle surging organized crime, violence, and insecurity. Add to that the long-standing issues of poverty and inequality, and a frustrated people increasingly embraced an old Mexican political custom: reverence for the caudillo.

Mexicans did not choose just any caudillo. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, has a narcissistic and tyrannical character, reinforced and sharpened by a belief in a messianic vocation. AMLO is the perfect populist. He does not represent the people; he embodies them. He is the people.
As president from 2018 to this year, AMLO destroyed practically the entire institutional edifice – health, education, culture, security – that had been built in the twentieth century, and established the basis for destroying the individual freedoms that comprised the constitutional legacy of the nineteenth century. The judiciary was the last bastion of Mexican democracy, but it has now been decimated by reforms that promise to destroy its independence and power to check the executive. With the rule of law no longer intact, individual liberties and human rights have been left unprotected.

The outlook is bleak. If Trump makes good on his promises to carry out a mass deportation of immigrants, raise tariffs, rewrite the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (which his own administration negotiated in 2018), and send the US military to hunt down drug traffickers on the border, he will precipitate a full-blown crisis in Mexico.

As for Sheinbaum, she could still call for a government of national unity, but I doubt she will. We should prepare for Mexican democracy’s funeral.

PS: That brings us back to Spinoza, for whom the state’s “proper role,” you explain, “is to regulate, not repress, religious passions; to promote justice and charity; and to guarantee freedom.” You also note that Spinoza’s “reliable income” gave him the “independence that his philosophizing would require.” With the proper role of the state and markets once again being hotly debated, what might Spinoza tell us about the state’s responsibility to deliver economic security and how governments should go about it?

EK: Spinoza’s conception of the state bears some similarities to that of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. For Spinoza, “the natural right of the individual man” is determined “not by sound reason, but by desire and power.” In other words, our rights are, above all, powers – faculties of the human condition – and, as such, they are not yielded, but dominated and controlled through fear and convenience.
From these concepts, we can infer an answer to your question. Although Spinoza, to my knowledge, doesn’t speak of markets, his position on economics would have been rationally consistent with his juridical exposition: unrestricted freedom would give way to a savage economy. There needs to be ample freedom, but limited by the convenience of others. It is up to the state to regulate that.
As for the state with no freedom – the totalitarian state – Spinoza did not anticipate it at all, despite his prescience. The drama of his century lay in religious wars, so he envisioned a state or sovereign body that would guarantee freedom, by limiting manifestations of faith. People could think, believe, and express themselves as they desired, with one caveat: they must not disturb the public peace. This basic design can be seen in all the liberal republics of our time.

Spinoza did not and could not anticipate the advent of states, such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, that claimed the position of the dogmatic and intolerant church. In such totalitarian contexts – the precursors to today’s authoritarian and populist regimes – individuals are completely helpless. As the state itself wages “religious” wars, the people lose all freedom. Security thus starts with the freedom and tolerance that Spinoza embodied.

PS: Spinoza’s “leap to freedom,” you write, was facilitated partly by his embrace of “free culture,” in which “horizontal exchange of printed pamphlets and books” replaced “university culture, with its vertical exchange of information from teachers to students” and “inflexible scholasticism.” Does this mean we need to rethink our approaches to education in order to cultivate reason and civic responsibility? Are there approaches in use today that you believe merit emulation?

EK: I believe that we must both undertake a critical review of our institutions of higher education as a source of knowledge and culture, and rediscover the importance of discussion. Spinoza refused a university position, because by its very nature, the institution constrained his freedom. He preferred to form study circles around “free culture,” which is first and foremost conversation.
In the seventeenth century, free culture not only pressed for religious tolerance, but also took charge of the development of the bourgeoisie and the dynamics of commerce. This process depended on capable professionals. Some notable figures were employed as civil servants (Hobbes, John Milton); others as consultants to wealthy families (John Locke). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had various jobs and contracts as a consultant while he was involved in the publishing trade. One might also be self-employed: Blaise Pascal used the carriages he inherited from his father to create the world’s first public-transportation system. Spinoza pursued the trade of lens polisher partly out of a scientific interest in optics, but it was also his source of independence.

Free culture’s intellectual, artistic, scientific, and technological achievements were much broader and more influential than those of the European universities. In other words, conversation – not the classroom – is where culture emerges and resides. Science, in our time, is the exception, but even science benefits from free conversation.

PS: In your 2022 book Spinoza en el Parque México (Spinoza in Mexico Park), you discuss a wide range of writers, philosophers, and thinkers, including other “heterodox” Jews about whom you once planned to write a separate book. When it comes to the pursuit of freedom, where do the legacies of other figures you mention, such as Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, overlap – or clash – with that of Spinoza?

EK: Heine, who called Spinoza “my brother in unbelief,” was a kind of Saint Paul to Spinoza’s Christ. Marx devoted a year of his young life to the study of Spinoza. All three figures believed in human perfectibility, only to different degrees and in different ways. For Spinoza, it was a product of reason; Heine viewed it as a feat of freedom; and for Marx, the redemptive revolution was the key.
Spinoza’s take was perhaps the most realistic. He was a forerunner of modern liberal democracy, and embraced rationality and tolerance. It was in the twentieth century that Spinoza’s ideas about the critical importance of reason in human life would be tested most forcefully. Did they fail that test? Judging by what happened in 1914-45, the answer would seem to be yes. But is it definitely so? I am not sure; I do not want to be sure.

Heine’s ideas would also be tested in the twentieth century. Were they terrifyingly cast into doubt in the Nazi death camps, in the gulags of Russia, in the wars that ripped Europe apart? Without a doubt. Did they fail definitively? I don’t think so. I cannot believe it.

But it is Marx to whom one might argue the twentieth century “belonged,” given that the revolution he inspired spanned almost the entire century, from 1917 to 1989. Marx prized not the freedom of the individual, but collective liberation. We can discuss until the end of time whether liberty and liberation converge, but I believe they do not. I believe that freedom is always individual, and liberation is the deceptive freedom of the collective, which has another name: power. I believe that this is what happened with Marx’s ideas: they ended up turning emancipation against itself.

A reader of Spinoza and a friend of Heine, Marx confused reason with historical reason, and promoted an ideology of liberation that crushed freedom. Of course, it is debatable whether Marx himself, who died in 1883, bears responsibility for the actions carried out in his name in the twentieth century. Whether or not they were embedded in his doctrine, there is no doubt that the reality of the revolution clashed with his wishes and predictions.

PS: In your book and throughout your career, you have displayed a fascination with Mexican and Latin American writers and thinkers. For readers who are less familiar with the region’s artistic and intellectual output, which figures and works should not be missed?

EK: One can find a collective biography of many such writers and thinkers in my 2012 book Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America, including the Cuban poet and hero José Martí, the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, the Peruvian social theorist José Carlos Mariátegui, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and the Nobel laureate novelists Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. But I will name three additional writers whose work should not be missed.

The first is the Cuban novelist and essayist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005), Latin America’s most distinguished dissident. Expelled from Cuba in 1965, he lived in London the rest of his life. Cabrera was our Jonathan Swift. His verbal inventiveness and sharp humor – a feast of Cuban puns and English wit – are irresistible. Through his nostalgic novels about Cuba – in which the writing is sensuous, plastic, and truly unforgettable – we are reminded that Cuba was once the Athens of the Caribbean. His essays display a moral depth reminiscent of George Orwell. Cabrera’s writings on cinema were particularly superb.

The second is Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid (born in 1934). Zaid is a prodigious, unclassifiable writer – a poet and poetry critic, essayist, economist, historian, and literary critic, and a sociologist of culture and revolution. In fact, Zaid has written a whole sociology around free culture. His 2003 book So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance has been translated into dozens of languages. His 1979 book El progreso improductivo anticipated theories about micro-enterprises and the fight against poverty that were applied much later and remain pertinent today.

The third is another Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo (1917-86). His classic 1955 novel Pedro Páramo – a new English translation is now available – was a precursor to magical realism, taking place not in the hallucinatory and festive tropics, but in the violent, dark, and arid Mexican landscape.

Publicado en Project Syndicate el 3 de diciembre de 2024.